2 More Security Breaches at Los Alamos Reported

Two more security breaches involving classified data have been found at the Energy Department’s beleaguered Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, government officials said Saturday.

In the first, a pair of floppy computer disks containing sensitive nuclear information were missing for 24 hours last week before they were found attached to a paper report in another secured area, officials reported. The second breach involved an unlocked storage room door.

Both infractions turned up during an inventory of all classified data at the lab taken in response to criticism over the temporary disappearance of two top-secret hard drives.

Jim Danneskiold, a lab spokesman, said officials are itemizing all sensitive information under their control in response to the recent uproar over the hard drives. “We’ve instituted a number of additional security measures beyond what’s required,” he said.

The two floppy disks containing classified information that was 10 years old were reported missing Wednesday at the nuclear weapon lab, Danneskiold said. But they were found a day later attached to a document in a nearby area, and apparently no classified data were compromised, he said.

Danneskiold would not disclose what type of information the disks contained. Officials have not yet determined how the disks got misplaced.

But because of their age, “we’re not even sure if there’s a computer at the lab that could still read the disks,” he said. The Department of Energy, which oversees the lab, has been asked to investigate mishandling of the materials.

In the second incident, Danneskiold said, a computer repair technician left an equipment closet unlocked inside a secure room. The room door was locked, however, he said.

Officials said neither incident was as serious as the disappearance of the hard drives, which were missing at least two months from the lab’s top-secret X Division and contained highly sensitive data about nuclear terrorism. A federal grand jury has been convened to investigate that infraction.

The hard drives were found nine days ago behind an office copying machine down the hall from where they disappeared. Since that area had been searched repeatedly in recent weeks, officials speculate that someone who failed to return the drives to their vault dropped them near the copier when attention focused on the disappearance.

An FBI official said one or more scientists who helped write the secret data on the hard drives may have become “so confident that the material was secure in their hands that they got lax.”

Human error rather than espionage is suspected. So far, there is no evidence that files on the hard drives were altered or copied, officials say.

Lab security has become an issue since Wen Ho Lee, a former lab scientist, was arrested in December and accused of security violations for downloading top-secret nuclear weapon files onto an unsecured computer. Lee, who has been jailed pending trial, has pleaded not guilty to 59 felony counts.